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Macrium or A N Other V System Restore
in my opinion if you store any personal data on a machine and it fails for whatever reason, be it corruption/dying hardware etc then a 3rd party utility is essential, Macriums is just my prefferred.
Another reason its far quicker to get back to where you were, just think how many things youve changed to get the system how you like it and got used to, and all those programs you need to reinstall and reregister, if you need to perform a clean install.
There are also more features within it, the homepage link explains them in more detail
It boils down to which is more reliable >> gotta go 3rd party, as you've found out

Which brings us to CherryTree, your first quote in the last post -where i said create an image now and start playing with Cherrytree
if we take it that CT is breaking the inbuilt System Restore function then were going round in a corrupt OS circle, even in a clean install scenario
Im not advocating making an image of a broken system but using it as a stepping stone

What did make my ears prick up was I think because the drive I use didn't have enough spaceThis causes multiple problems you should never let your disk space usage go above 90%
Many processes require and use temp files to work.

Time is relative and as your not a relative it DOESNT matter
so keep posting

Thanks Roy, there's so much to help me here! I've been getting more than a bit fed up with Avast lately anyway. It'll take me a while to catch up with this, as I've got some other work I have to deal with, but I'll just say the disc space I was talking about is on an external drive, not the machine. I use that as the destination for backups. My GoFlex 240 gig has about 80 gig free on it, and I think the Windows Backup routine reported that it wasn't enough space. My machine's HDD (actually SSD) is only 40GB used out of a (nominal) 120GB. I didn't create different partitions on it as the SSD is pretty small and I thought it would be better to shove data mostly on another drive. Maybe you thought I was talking about writing an image to the machine's drive? I could have a clearout of the external or use another one. Memory's getting cheap. Time's relative, lol.

Can't thank you enough, Roy (apparently I have to spread the love around first!).

What I did...
I decided to uninstall Avast from Safe Mode, as you recommended, after choosing Avira as its replacement (the free version and just the a/v for now, but tempted partly by the free VPN and other addons). That seemed to go smoothly.

I then opened CherryTree (which previously I had found would show its window if maximized, but not normal, so I'd been using it maximized). At first it didn't open, just like the problem was back - or had it gone normal? Nope, it was maximized but not showing. However, from the right-click on the preview on its taskbar item, I restored it, and it showed normally! Had it reversed the issue? No, once I maximized again, it worked in both, minimized and closed to the tray properly and seems fixed!

Second issue was that Ccleaner had gone weird, not opening and having a default exe icon instead of its own. That was still the same. I thought I'd just try re-installing the latest version (updating from 5.32 to 5.35). Yikes, Avira then reported that this installation file was infected with a trojan. https://www.avira.com/en/support-thr....533.1&track=1
Looking into this, it should be fixed already from 5.34 and this looks like a false positive. It shouldn't even have affected my computer, as it was on the 32 bit and/or cloud-based versions. (I briefly checked out instructions for removing the possible infection, but don't want to screw with the system too much yet, and it involvs the usual multiple installs of malware removal tools.) I also read of infections earlier in the uninstall file, but that ran ok and I've just uninstalled it for now. I didn't know Ccleaner had been taken over by Avast! Maybe that's not a good sign - I used to trust Ccleaner implicitly.

I then ran KB987421, and it looks to my untrained eye like it's finished uninstalling Avast.

Once again, thanks torchwood! I'll mark this thread as fixed unless you have any further concerns! Please let me know if there's anything I should do in addition to checking the system restore works and starting making regular images of the drive as well as file backups. One question left hanging for me is why Backups was reporting a lack of space to save an image - does it save the whole drive including unused space? That would explain it.
Up the Saints!

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